.

August 31, 2008

If you can't tell, that's the display for Pixar's recent WALL-E, all smashed up beside a dumpster outside my local movie theater. The irony should not be lost on anyone who's seen the film. And yes, I walked several times up and down the block, contemplating taking it with me despite having no means of doing so and no place to put it. That's not the point!

August 30, 2008

Okay guys, I know we all bitch and moan about how boring and formula anime and manga are, so now is the time for us to man up, put our money where our internet mouths are, and support a genuinely unique piece of work. Akira Hiramoto's Me and the Devil Blues is about real-life blues legend Robert Johnson, who, it is said, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar skills. Hiramoto takes this tall tale and absolutely runs away with it, leading, for example, to the ten-fingered right hand we see here and a road trip with none other than Clyde Barrow. In short, it's an American tall tale stretched taller by a Japanese guy.

There isn't much that's stereotypically "manga" about this book: the characters are, for the most part, photorealistic, and the atmosphere is a constant, heavy darkness. This realistic look makes for a sharp contrast with the surreal, grotesque and often horrific things that happen to RJ on his journey. As a purely visual medium, the comic has to find a unique way to represent Johnson's music. We see it through what it does to RJ-- he's transformed literally and figuratively-- what it does to other people, the way reality blurs when he plays. Of course, the manga's going work a lot better for you if you find some of Johnson's work, let it play while you read, and get yourself nice and familiar with our protagonist.

Probably anticipating that this isn't exactly going to be a big hit with the teen-focused manga market, Del Rey has released the first two books of Me and the Devil Blues as a $20 double volume. I'll warn you now: the book ends on a cliffhanger and the next double volume isn't due until the very end of the year. But this is an outstanding and overlooked piece of work, so why don't you be a cool guy-or-lady and buy the first book anyway? Amazon has it for a lot less than $20. Fun fact: the Japanese volumes were sold for 666 yen. Get it?

August 24, 2008

The line wasn't exactly to the point I expected-- I played three matches in about two and a half hours of waiting before I gave up-- but it was pretty serious business, with an early wait of 10-15 players, eventually ballooning to the totally unmanageable in the late evening. The game was being really tightly watched and organized, which felt kind of unusual. People signed up on a sheet as opposed to the old-fashioned quarter line, which would just not have worked here.

Facts about the setup: It's a homemade sit-down Japanese-style versus cabinet. For the uninitiated, this means that there are two machines, one for each player. It's roomy. The parts on the machine are real Japanese Sanwa parts, unlike, say, the fake-Sanwa setup on the Guilty Gear machine with the broken Hard Slash button. Considering the line and the amount of time it takes to play a one-player game, you'd likely be lynched for trying to do so. Games are $1, and to keep the machine from being monopolized by high-level players from the start, the game ends after one player gets to six consecutive wins. Pictures start here.

Like with SFIII, it's kind of hard to really see this game right until you see it in motion. The aesthetic is certainly "let's do SFII again," but the way they reproduced the look of the old Akiman art as opposed to simply emulating SFII really validates the whole thing. You see a lot of crazy facial expressions in the screens, and while the game is really heavy on those, they're just the hit animations. In SFIV, the characters are playing to the audience. It's not that characters don't change facial expressions in 3D fighting games, it's just that you've never noticed it. It's never been highlighted. Given the distance from the screen the characters' faces are, normal facial expressions just aren't immediately noticeable. So, in order to make sure we notice, SFIV makes the expressions BIG. It's the same principle as in theater, right? My favorite thing about this is the animation before a super move is activated: the player on the recieving end of the super will always make an "OH SHI--" face whether he blocks the move or is hit. The timing and the expression are just right, and-- get this-- they perfectly captured the mood of the crowd of spectators as they watched the fight. The animation really does a great job of imbuing everything about the proceedings with an over-the-top character.

I stand by my remarks
on the characters, but Rufus, the fat guy, is pretty silly and awesome.
He was probably put in as a concession to me and people like me. I
might learn him, but I didn't try to play him. I didn't really have a handle on any of the characters I played, with the sole exception of Ryu. There's just no time to learn anything in one match. Sagat and Balrog are doing quite well at this extremely early stage in the game's evolution, where being able to outrange and out-prioritize the other guy with simple, basic attacks counts for a lot.

The engine, well, I don't think anybody has exactly figured out the engine yet. The base is certainly SFIII, but the characters are SFII and even though it feels just like a 2D game, the weight and speed aren't quite identical to any SF game that has come before it. Our reflexes might be bad, but a lot of people, myself included, were completely flubbing our timing. The game is so young right now that even the typically elite Chinatown Fair crowd is fumbling around with it. It's kind of exciting and a little bit amazing to see this: nobody can play the game at home and there's only this one SFIV machine for many states around, so people have to learn the game right here and right now.

My last match, as mentioned in the title of the post, was against SF tournament legend Justin Wong. It was probably the only time I will ever even win half a round on that guy. Now a dude like Wong, you can figure, is about as far as anybody else has gotten with the new game. When I played him, he was testing out the basics of Abel, one of the new characters. I, frankly, didn't know a damn thing, so I picked Ryu. Ryu is not very far removed from SFIII Ryu, so I had a very a basic idea of what I was doing. This put me in a way better spot than when I was trying to play Guile or Dhalsim. I only learned one thing that match: Abel's roll goes through goddamn everything, and Ryu's hurricane kick goes over Abel's roll and knocks him in the back of the head as it does so. Aside from "HIT HIM! HE'S GONNA THROW YOU!" that was about as deep as my understanding got. And learning that much, I suppose, was pleasant enough.

August 22, 2008

My review of SFIII: Third Strike is up on Action Button as part of the 25-game best-games-ever Action Button Manifesto. It's a versus-mode review! Anyway, I've been busy with school bureaucracy and the job search (somebody employ me) and shit like that, but I'll definitely see you suckers in line at Chinatown Fair.

August 20, 2008

I want all of you to watch this journey into the mind of a special young gentleman. Hi! He's Michael! This is good work. It could probably stand to be tightened up, though: a couple of parts drag on without jokes (I guess in the name of authenticity?), and the gag distribution is a little uneven. I'm thinking it should be three to five minutes, ideally. But then the dude pops up and says "YOU'RE THE BEST!" and it's all worth it! It also totally needs more of those side shots where the dude turns his head. Those make me laugh my ass off.

Still, this is a pretty class idea, and I am watching the video responses eagerly. The one that's already been posted is magnificent. Semper waifu.

August 17, 2008

SDS over at Ogiue Maniax has posted about a couple of things that tie together: when I realized my comment was getting really long, I decided to turn it into a blog post.

We talked about exactly this at Otakon, and we certainly had plenty of occasions to do so: that anime conventions--far more so than the typical geek convention-- are often a breeding ground for either obnoxious attention-whoring antics or creepy stalker shit. I pulled out the Geek Social Fallacies like I tend to do.

Geek conventions are founded on #4 and #1, that is, "If I get them all together, all my friends will be friends with each other. If one of them objects to the other, then the former is Hitler." Nobody wants to be Hitler, and many geeks are typically introverted people who don't like to rock boats, and many geeks have no idea how to act in public, and many geeks are just goddamn opportunists. So a lot of people get away with shit that doesn't fly in regular society, from the benign to the wonderful to the irritating to the skeezy.

Just Friday I was telling a friend the story about the Otakon Artist's Alley, which I've been following closely since SDS pointed it out to me. When I got to the punchline-- that not only were these people not busted at-con, they were guaranteed tables at Otakon next year because some water dripped onto one of their fourteen tables-- we laughed our asses off and I came to the conclusion that "anime cons are that one friend that everybody takes advantage of."

If there's that one person who feels obligated to their friends enough to do them all constant favors, or the con that, as an institution, feels obligated to their kindred spirits to be accommodating and slow to judgment, there is always going to be somebody, friend or stranger, who's going to stroll in whistling and ride that train as far as it goes. Sometimes they will crash into a wall, and the cops will take them away in their Sasuke costume while they cry and the world cheers. On 4chan (so take this with a grain of salt, guys) someone claiming to know the artists was saying that they take 5 to 8 grand away from every convention they go to. They probably outdid a lot of dealers. But let's not ostracize anybody, you know?

This, about sexual harassment at comic cons (thanks Dave), has also been everywhere. If someone asked me "what do you think (NAME OF ANIME CONVENTION THAT YOU DIDN'T ATTEND) was like?" you know what I'd say? I'd say "I'm sure, my dear Watson, though I am states away from that location, that it was sexually awkward." And you know what? They'd give me a fucking medal. They would call me Captain Discovery. Between the outfits people are wearing, the hugpillows, the glomping, the yaoi paddles (good riddance, Otakon), the mountain of porn on sale, and, of course, the undercurrent of nudity and thrill that we know is inherent to all anime, the sexual tension is dripping down from the walls and making a mess of everything.

How to deal with these perplexing new feelings, Shinji-kun? No, Shinji! Bad Shinji! Don't jerk off on the comatose girl! And I guess that's what this is to me, except Asuka is conscious, and Shinji didn't even really have any time to whip it out before she got away from him. And a lot of people say "Oh, manchild! He knows not what he does! It's the Asperger's you know!". That doesn't matter. That's not how you deal with shit like this. People need to learn what's up. Just like that put-upon guy that you know that drives everybody everywhere, people have to put their foot down and say JESUS CHRIST, SHINJI, I'M NOT "LENDING" YOU FIFTY BUCKS SO YOU CAN GO TO BALTIMORE AND TAKE UPSKIRT SHOTS FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE ESCALATOR, UUARRRRRGH. Alternately, if you are the Cutey Honey getting her ass squeezed, try JESUS CHRIST, SHINJI, and then look like you're gonna say something, but then just kick the guy in the balls until he cries. Then say BITCH, THAT'S WHY I CALLED YOU SHINJI. Who doesn't know "look but don't touch" nowadays? It's about the space and respect we all deserve, and simple human dignity, you silly fucks! It's also the rule that lets us all ogle that dominatrix in front of the game room last weekend! Daaaaaayum!

BONUS PROTIP: Actually, the AX vs. J-List story in that link is a great example of an anime con playing the friend that everybody takes advantage of. In order to sell porn to kids. Which is probably a big reason all these kids come to anime cons. As a scientific experiments, let's start two anime conventions that run on the same day, across the street from each other. One will have a big sign up front that says "WE SELL PORN TO KIDS", and the other will have a big sign up front that says "NO SELLING PORN TO KIDS". Then we'll just compare attendance numbers. Science!

August 15, 2008

(would you believe that Typepad ate most of this post when I hit save and I gotta type it all over again? it's true)

Ateil is a Japanese online card game which is being run here in English by Media Blasters, of all people. They were at Otakon but I didn't actually check the booth out, just took their flier. I would have written up the game faster, but I am, I admit, somewhat under its grip. Alteil is a far more traditional card game than Kongai: it owes its design more to Magic and its ilk than to anything else. I never took up Magic, but it does interest me from afar. My favorite videogame structure is the arcade style: the game is not packed with content in the way that a modern 20-hour blockbuster is, but what's there is compelling, involving and challenging enough to warrant revisiting. The arcade game is short-term brain candy. You can see this from the perfect run on a 30-minute-long shooter that took a player hundreds of hours to be able to pull off. You can see it in tournament battles between expert players that take five minutes, tops, yet represent years of training and practice. To me, the card battle-- in and of itself-- falls perfectly into this area. And, what the hell. I want to try new genres.

What kills me about collectible card games is not the card game itself, it's the whole "collectible" business. As a player, I like to have the full game immediately available to me, and I definitely don't want to have elements of the game held at extortionate ransom under glass in a comic shop. Alteil abolishes the player-to-player economy that ultimately ends up in such gouging, but it doesn't eliminate the need to pay in order to be competitive, either: it just gives you a free trial until you eventually run up against the reality of buying new cards.

Honestly, the rules are pretty dense: I'm not going to bother explaining the core systems because that would make this post even longer than it's already coming out. Even after a long tutorial, I had no idea what I was doing until I'd finished a couple matches and realized what was attached to what. Moving from bewilderment to comfort to proficiency will take a number of matches, but that's how games like this work: the more you know, the more involving it becomes. Eventually I found myself thinking over decks while not even playing the game or anything. It doesn't hurt that the game runs in a browser window: I can just leave it running in a Firefox tab and play a round whenever the urge strikes me.

The fact that the game can hand out a free starter deck is one of a few advantages it has as an online-only card game where the cards don't physically exist and, furthermore, have no market value. The starter deck (you can choose one of four color types at the start) affords the player a surprising amount of leeway: you really can tweak a good amount and work out a strategy for your deck. Of course, with only fifty cards, there are only so many strategies you can build. If you want to experiment further, or play a new color, then you'll have to buy more cards. If you're content to run your deck as it is, you'll eventually run into a competitive wall where other players have access to powerful cards that you don't, and therefore can put together strong decks focusing on those cards. Either way, if you get really interested in the game, you're going to end up either paying for it or quitting.

The "free-to-play" online game is an inherently sticky situation:
you need to get your hardcore base to pay to be competitive, but you
want anybody to be able to give the game a shot, and you want them to
be able to stay as long as they want. The game is competitive, after all, and if they want to get more competitive with it, they'll pay, right?

Of course, this has led to an interesting split between players and developers. The former group believes that if they didn't pay in the beginning, they ought to never pay. Which is fair. They don't have to. Furthermore, in the interest of fairness, the line goes, the default decks should be strong enough for the user to deal with any deck built by anybody with cards they paid for. So basically, they shouldn't pay and they should be able to beat everybody else, too. You can see where this makes no sense from the designer's point of view. No one deck is ever going to be the appropriate counter for everybody else's decks, especially not the one you start out with. If the starter deck was that good, after all, nobody would ever bother trying anything else, right? And we'd all play the same four decks forever until the game went out of business. Anyway, this game is very sparsely populated at present, topping out at about 120 people online. While I don't have hard data in front of me, this wall does seem to be making players-- what few players there are-- quit when they enter the ranked arenas and are rudely awakened by strong high-level players, of which there are fewer still.

And if you want some cards, you've got to go to the game for them. The game is very up front about the fact that there is no trading between players: in fact, the impossibility of market manipulation like you see in physical CCGs is lauded as a selling point on the website. This is a two-edged sword for the player: on the one hand, you can't be gouged for that rare card you want. On the other, you can't do it to anybody else, either: you can only sell that rare card you don't need back to the game, and the game does the gouging. Resale values are not exactly charitable, topping out at the game-money equivalent of three bucks for the rarest cards in the game: cards that other people do need and have to spend a hell of a lot more money trying to buy via booster packs (approximately 1.50 for five cards and $21 for a 15-pack box of 75). We can see what this does for the people running the game: eliminating the secondary market means that all the money goes to you. Oh ho ho!

Having thoroughly explored the system and knowing the downsides, I decided that I was enjoying this game enough to make the jump into buying some cards. Now it didn't make me God or nothin', but with more cards came more choice, and I was able to further streamline the basic strategy I'd picked up from the starter--hit them before they hit me-- into something more subtle, complex and, frankly, a far bigger pain in the ass. With both a better deck and better play, my winrate has pretty sharply increased. Of course, the whole "collectible" problem that I loathe sets in: I can't just buy cards for the color I play, so upon purchase I end up with a pile of cards that I don't need, and I'm without cards that I'd like to have. So I'm stuck either throwing away my cards for chump change, playing minigames for chump change, or further shelling out, which gets you more money in one shot than recycling cards or playing minigames will get you in months.

And the game is equipped for some serious shelling out, Korean-MMO-style: there is, for example, an item that sharply increases your gained experience (at certain levels you're given free cards), money (the kind of money that buys clothes, not cards), and chance to get a "treasure battle", a match where the winner gets a card. It costs $15 and lasts ten matches. Jesus. There are always extremes, after all, and Alteil allows the insane plenty of room to be as insane as they wanna be. Or just rich, maybe? Nah. Probably insane.

So I'm of two minds about the game: the core game is deep, rewarding stuff, but even putting aside silly stuff like experience doublers, I can see expenses for cards alone quickly becoming exorbitant: the exact thing that put me off CCGs to begin with. I'll keep playing for now, but I'm not sure how many "investments" I'm going to make at a time. I do want to give the game brownie points because the GMs are a bunch of robot dorks who say things like "BE BRAVE" and "ARE YOU A NEWTYPE?" when I level up. If you want to join me on Alteil, my name there is Sasuraiger, and my guild is Futae no Kiwami AHHHH. There's no stronger technique!

August 13, 2008

Of course, one of the cool things about being in a parallel universe
like an anime convention is that if you think somebody is awesome you
can just ask them for a picture and they'll pretty much always say yes. You can also wear a bear costume, if you choose to do so. Yes, this is Pedobear cosplay. This guy was everywhere, but this time he was in front of the CP box. So creepy it's actually heroic. Somebody else was taking this picture and I jumped in right after it was taken, and I asked the guy for the same shot. Probably the single best picture I took at the con.

I'm going to name the best cosplayer at the con right now and I'm going to be right. You won't be able to argue this with me. The Most Dangerous Cosplay was Wesker. I'm going to tell you why now. We got into the elevator and I asked him for a picture right away, which is what you see here. One of my friends asked him if he could say "master of unlocking" and we all said "THAT'S A BARRY LINE." Then the elevator started, and it was quiet. Right before the elevator stopped, Wesker burst out:

"STOP IT! DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR!"Just amazing.

Batman was actually the Batman seen in the hysterical B&J Supersquad public service announcements; when I said thanks, he said "you're welcome" in that exact same ridiculous voice. Too awesome. The Joker was a pretty huge presence at the con, actually. Anime fans have completely co-opted him the way they did with Jack Sparrow and 300 and any other geek-famous movie. Nurse Joker was in creepy character, which I both appreciated and was a tad unnerved by.

Oh, speaking of pop ephemera, we found Carmen Sandiego! She was in Baltimore all this goddamn time! Why didn't anybody check? We were really excited we'd finally found her, but then she reminded us that we didn't have warrants. There was nothing we could do. Foiled again, Sandiego. Damn you! You could have stolen Baltimore any time you wanted! Now I know how Zenigata feels. Other visiting characters from your childhood included King Hippo, the Green Ranger, and the Ghostbusters. Sadly, Musashi was not present.

Second Most Dangerous: Deadpool waiting for food at the chain Mexican place. He knew how good a shot this was too, and posed appropriately. Just like a real Deadpool. How chill is that?

Right as we were stopping take this shot, the mother and daughter behind us likewise stopped, surprised. They asked each other why these guys had stopped. Then the really loud answer: "Oh! They're taking pictures of the freaks!" Well, yeah, I wouldn't be taking pictures of the cunts, now would I? I didn't actually have any other run-ins with the normal citizenry of Baltimore. This is somewhat owed to the fact that while I brought it with me, I ultimately decided to hang up the Pac-Man hat this year. Too damn hot, and besides that, you need to know when to lay a gag to rest.

Third Most Dangerous: Rena from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni looking, intentionally or not, fuckin' creeeepy around midnight on Saturday. I'm apparently not the only person who got this shot, so I'm going to say "intentionally". Normally I wouldn't post a picture that came out this crappy, but I think here it only works in Rena's favor. There's a lot more than this, but I've dumped them all onto Flickr, as not all these pictures have cute stories attached to them.

August 12, 2008

I decided to squeeze the concert aftermath into the Saturday post because the concert post was so long. I met about half of my link list! Bunch of alright guys. I believe I will be on a podcast shortly, saying nothing important. I rushed for a drink for my poor parched, destroyed throat. I was completely exhausted from the jumping and the yelling and the fist-pumping all night, and contrary to my initial plan of spending the rest of the night watching Bubblegum Crisis, I wanted to do little but eat, drink and sleep. That concert had me unable to speak quite right for the next day or two. We settled on pizza for dinner, and I read my buddy's sister's shoujo manga until it showed up. Have you guys read Walkin' Butterfly? It's great!

I made the point to my friends that reading this was kind of like the gender-reversed version of a shonen fight manga: a tall, rough and insecure young woman tries to go into modeling as kind of a self-challenge. Throughout, she is put through literal training sessions by the people around her in the business. She watches her old boss walk hundreds of times (on secret hidden archival tapes) and replicates it until her feet are all beat up. She pretends to be an up-and-comer that nobody's heard of yet. She stands under a waterfall and tries not to get fucked by an old European man. Real trials, you know? It's just like the girl version of wearing a ridiculous spring apparatus and then running on a treadmill over a pool filled with sharks and piranhas while wearing weighted clothing. I totally hope Michiko makes it after all.

Anyway, then the security came in. Again. Same kinda stuff, only difference was we were in another room, watching the Olympics at a really low volume and waiting for pizza. The pizza took a really long time, and as a New Yorker, I found it pretty poor. I went to bed, and then it was Saturday.

The first order of business, after breakfast and all that, was buying the JAM merchandise we'd missed on the first day. It turned out that it was being sold at Bandai's booth: we had expected an individual booth and just didn't bother checking Bandai out.

Before I continue, I'd like to make a side note of the industry booths. The diminished presence of the US anime industry was extremely noticeable. The only truly fancy booths were Bandai's and Funimations, and those were nowhere near the kind of small-building displays that you used to see in the early 2000s. Worst of all was poor ADV's appearance: a mysterious, unlabeled dealer was selling off exclusively ADV stock for $10 a disc, which, frankly, still wasn't enough to get me to bite. It absolutely had to be them, but they sure didn't want anybody to know it. Media Blasters was there, of course, but they've always been a tiny company whose tables fit in just fine with the other fan-run businesses.

Meanwhile, we got our T-shirts and our CDs and lucky us, it turned out that Bandai was giving out autograph tickets for a 4:30 autograph session to anybody who waited at their booth until 12. And so we did: we watched the same trailers about a billion times in a row, wondered if maybe they could change Kamina's dub voice actor, and puzzled over why anybody would buy DVDs of Aika R-16 just to see erect nipples poking through the characters' clothes. Line management here was also a big problem: they just allowed a crowd to form and said "GO" at noon, causing a terribly uncomfortable pushing, shoving stampede as passers-by cut to the front and snuck past people from the side. That said, we all got our tickets. Feeling a great weight lifted, we proceeded to walk around the dealers' room for the twenty minutes we had before the JAM Q&A started.

I found some great vintage stuff at the Media Blasters table (warning: huge files): I scored a Fire Bomber poster (hoping that maybe Fukuyama would sign it), a Patlabor promo poster, and the prize of the dealer's room, an early-80's poster for the third Mobile Suit Gundam movie, featuring the famous Last Shooting scene and drawn by legendary mechanical designer Kunio Ohkawara himself. At any other con I would have called this the highlight of my weekend, but this con had JAM Project, for chrissake. I also nearly bought an Odin fanbook, but I thought better of it. Later, 4chan's MrVacBob informed me that pretty much everybody who would have bought it did the same.

And there they were again, for the Q&A panel. It turned out that the way you got your autograph ticket for the 2:30 session (keep in mind that at 11, the autograph line had already filled the area and was stretching out of the hallway) was you asked a question here. I didn't have anything more interesting than "who's your favorite robot?", which I now regret not having asked. The questions were pretty fun, fluffy stuff-- including such tough battles as Dani vs Mcdonald's-- made more so by the band members who are, how shall we say, naturally goofy people. Fukuyama, who I've mentioned a lot because he was so consistently awesome, really stole the show: everybody was jokey but he was particularly quick with his one-liners. Overall, the band looked as happy as we were to be there, and seemed to be genuinely grateful for their fanbase. It was really great to hear from them. High points included the yelling part (again, Fukuyama stole this one with his famous Macross 7 line, "LISTEN TO MY SONG!").

I also want to note here that the staffers at the autograph area were totally helpful and nice in explaining the autograph situation to us. Thanks, guys.

After that we killed some time in the dealer's room, the game rooms, and getting lunch until it was time to go back to Bandai's booth, where we got in line and chatted with the industry.We were kinda behind the booth, so when things started, we had to peek at the band walking into the booth through the openings in the booth itself. When they were seated, all that was visible from where we were standing was Fukuyama's big hair.

Now I was starting to worry. I had my Fire Bomber poster all ready, but I also had my tour T-shirt. Now there's a one-item limit, as in everybody signs one item. It wouldn't be cool of me to have JAM sign a Fire Bomber poster, because after all, only one of them ever had anything to do with Macross 7. On the other hand, a signed Fire Bomber poster would be priceless. I talked to a couple of people on the line who were in this exact dilemma. By the way, the poster says on it, in English:

So, in hopes that the Fire Bomber would help a brother out, I gave the T-shirt to JAM's handlers for signing and simply stood there in front of Fukuyama with my Fire Bomber poster out. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Fire Bomber." When Fukuyama looked up from the autograph and got a good look at the poster, he got this "oh, wow!" look on his face. I was kind of shocked that he was so happy to see it! I was more shocked when, in the middle of our handshake, the dude bearhugged me. What a guy! The only downside of this priceless gift was that at the speed autographs were moving, my T-shirt was already past Dani and in the hands of Hironobu Kageyama himself. I really wanted to shake Dani's hand, but there wasn't any time. I still feel kinda bad about it!

And what the hell do you say to Hironobu Kageyama? I couldn't think of anything after the handshake and the "Thank you so much" I said to everybody, so I did made a finger-gun with my hand and said "SPARKING!" like he always does when he sings Cha-La. He laughed. I could tell he'd probably seen it a hundred times today, but he laughed.

And what the hell do you say to Masaaki Endoh? He gave me this really deadpan "Hi." after signing and we shook hands. You see, Masaaki Endoh is "most powerful". He talks with his hands. I didn't expect such a truly mighty handshake, and I actually had to step it up, giving him the finger slip at the end for some local flavor.

Right after a big, strong, tough-guy handshake, I encountered tiny Masami Okui and her unbelievably tiny hand. This took some adjustments. I tried not to break her.

And then I passed a Yoko cosplayer out of the booth (this is a good way to get a fanboy's eyes on where he needs to go: clever move, Bandai) and we were done with JAM Project! Kind of a sad realization, but there it was. And Fire Bomber hugged me. We all compared signed goods and did an 80's high-five jump. Nothing too important happened after that, as nobody in my group could quite straighten out dinner arrangements for a couple of hours. While I was in the game room beating people at VF5, JAM was Bandai's surprise guest. So yes, I regret that. We went to that Mexican food place not far from the center, and I paid way too much for underwhelming steak quesadillas.

We tried to check out late-night Otakon but the place was teeming with kiddy ravers and people in mile-long lines for hentai panels. As we walked deeper into the place the crowd got progressively more obnoxious. We turned our backs before the rave was even in sight.

After that I hit the game room and played Battle Fantasia until closing. The owner was there, and he showed me the basics. The game is not at all what I expected from Arc, and I think it's wonderful that it's not just another game in the GG engine like Hokuto or Sengoku Basara Cross. This is a much slower and more deliberate game. We joked that the only way for a new fighting game to get any recognition is to go the Arcana Heart route and pour on the moe. The character design here is much more varied of course, as are the gameplay styles. My character, Fleed, was kind of a Balrog-style dash-punch type of character. My friends, meanwhile, discovered Senkou no Ronde. I thought it was very interesting how appealing this game was to anime fans at the convention and how few of them knew it even existed: when I played, about five or six people passed by asking what it was, where they could get it, and so on. Ubisoft might have done a lot better with this game if they'd pushed it to the anime market instead of suppressing its nature.

Sunday isn't really worth talking about: the dealer's room was too mobbed to get in, and I didn't really bother doing anything else. The Greyhound ride home was a horrific six and a half hours, plus our bus was overbooked and I barely made it on at all. If I ever go to Otakon again I'm ponying up for Amtrak. The money saved is seriously not worth the trouble.

But would I go again? You know, I honestly had a lot of fun. I spent a lot of money, but I had a lot of fun. Met a lot of people I wouldn't have met, got a good price on an Arcade Bumstead, and I met the best musical guests an anime convention could ever have. I'm still glowing from it all. I guess I still have until a few months from now to decide whether or not I want to come back. I'll let you guys know. In the meantime we still have the "awesome cosplay" post left, so look forward to that.